Abstract: Freshness is one of the most important quality indicators of aquatic products. Accurately judging the freshness of aquatic products is not only an important measure to regulate the aquatic product market, but also a necessary trend to meet the increasing requirements of consumers for food quality and safety. Traditional sensory evaluation, and microbial, physicochemical and electrochemical assays have been widely used to evaluate the freshness of aquatic products. What’s more, in order to meet the requirements for sensitive, rapid and non-destructive detection of aquatic products freshness, some detection methods have been developed by integrating modern spectroscopy with mass spectrometry and/or other emerging technologies, which have the advantages of fast analysis, high repeatability, and accurate quantitation. This paper summarizes and analyses the commonly used methods for freshness detection of aquatic products with a focus on their advantages and disadvantages, and it gives an outlook on future trends in this area.

Key words: freshness; aquatic products; traditional detection methods; sensory biomimetic technology; physicochemical analysis technology; spectral technology; proteomics